This Hardest Winter
by Alphabet Pie
Summary: Happy 411 Day 4.11.10! Vexen teaches Marluxia a lesson about ice and flowers' susceptibility to such. Lemon. 411. Rushed, apologies for the poor quality.


Marluxia's been tending to his plants all afternoon when there's a stiff, autonomous knock at his door. Standing from his place of servitude, he brushes off his loose, casual garments, and makes his way through the maze of trees and flowerbeds to his sanctuary's entrance. It's Vexen, which in itself brings a smile to Marluxia's lips, but moreover the slender man is standing with the posture and body language that Marluxia translates into a night he knows he'll enjoy.  
"Can I help you?" He asks with a quirk to his tone of voice. When Vexen has that hint of a look in his eye, conversation is nothing more than a formality. Vexen rolls his eyes a little.  
"I wish to... take you out tonight."  
"Oh?"  
Vexen shrugs.  
"An experiment, if you will."  
Marluxia can feel the cattish grin creeping onto his face as he stretches with an inward groan of satisfaction.  
"My, we are adventurous tonight, darling."  
Vexen chooses to ignore Marluxia's comment, simply sweeping aside for Marluxia to pass.  
"Come."  
"For you, any time," Marluxia intones, because sexual innuendo is practically obligatory in conversations with Vexen. The Academic does not seem impressed or amused by this, but he lets it slide. There is the rush of an opening portal and Vexen gestures briefly to his younger counterpart before stepping through. Marluxia thinks to grab his thick leather coat to protect against the darkness, and follows.  
What hits him first is an icy blast of wind that stabs like a hundred bladed knife. It knocks the momentum out of him and for a few moments he struggles to keep his balance against the blizzard. Vexen, lost in the fog and swirling flaked, has lead him into the thick of a snow storm.  
Marluxia is quick to express his distaste.  
"What the _hell_?"  
The turbulent drives recede into a soft flurry of snowflakes that melt on Marluxia's skin and settle in his hair. He catches Vexen, a little distance away, perched with impossible grace in the drifts of snow. If anything, he looks amused. Bones already soaked in the sub-zero temperatures, it's the last thing Marluxia needs to draw his prickling lips into a tight line and hiss, dangerously, in the back of his throat.  
"What do you think you're playing at?"  
Vexen stands, a devastatingly beautiful ghost and master to the ice, eyes sparkling in a way that chills Marluxia's blood.  
"I'm not _playing_ at anything," He quips in lieu of an explanation as he beckons Marluxia over with the twitch of elongated fingers. "Or I am. It depends on your perspective, I suppose."  
"Quit it with the riddles," Marluxia snaps irritably, rubbing at his arms in an effort to stay warm. "I'm cold. Show me whatever's worth this Godforsaken weather and take me home."  
Vexen smiles again, reaching out for Marluxia's hand and tugging him stumblingly close. The Assassin finds himself flush to Vexen's body, emanating if not a warmth at least a vague lack of any biting cold. And Vexen smiles down at him with the same faint amusement as he toys almost lazily with Marluxia's shirt buttons.  
"Patience, flower."  
Marluxia hisses again but the sound is stopped by the coldest of passionate kisses. The wind knocked out of him, he cannot retaliate when Vexen twists fluidly and drops him into a deep drift of snow. He sinks, flakes melting into his clothes, fighting for energy to throw Vexen's surprisingly heavy form off, open a portal and retreat to comforting warmth. But when Vexen's nails creep inside his cloak to scratch at his burning skin, he's thrown again, reduced to a shivering, messy heap of half-conscious groans and gasps.  
"F-fuck," He just about manages to grind out through the dizzying cold and mindblowing sensations of Vexen's body against his. With not even four buttons undone, he can't understand why he's losing it so quickly. Vexen's mouth is hot, wet, preceding a tingle of freezing saliva trailing across his skin.  
"Th-this really isn't the time or place," He tries to say but really moans, blinking his eyes in a dazzle of frost in an attempt to make out the lithe figure of Vexen's naked form in the snow, clothes lost in an instant. As flakes drift between them Marluxia finds himself almost distracted, displaced from the bitter ice encroaching his body.  
"I'm cold," He states blankly, his cracking voice alien to his own ears. Vexen watches him, a faraway creature, with hands splayed on his exposed stomach. When had he lost his shirt? When had his fingers and toes turned blue from the ice? He speaks again, a helpless child in Vexen's experienced arms. "I'm cold..."  
Vexen laughs with kisses that Marluxia desperately craves, for the glimpses of warmth and functional senses.  
"So vulnerable," Vexen says with an unusual softness to his voice. "So... breakable."  
Something in Marluxia's mind snaps. Synapses connect. Pride and horror take dominance, force his weak muscles to scrabble from the ice's grip.  
"Are you insane?"  
Vexen, merciless, pushes him down once more.  
"Perhaps."  
Marluxia finds deft fingers effortlessly working loose the clasp of his belt, tugging the leather band away and flinging it somewhere forgotten. His body disappears to the cold, only flashes of pleasure on his skin and a flare of heat deep within him to remind him that he still half exists.  
Over time, he's almost grown accustomed to Vexen's occasional power trips; the Academic has always been tricky, their trysts an exhilarating mix of submission, domination and adrenaline-fuelled power play. But when Vexen decides that it's time for Marluxia to be the one on hands and knees - a frequent if rarely consequential occurrence - it usually doesn't involve killing him in the process.  
Naked in the snow, skin blue and prickling, Marluxia suddenly realises why Vexen brought him here: his only chance for warmth is physical contact. And when Vexen pulls away with a deliberately arousing brush to his sensitive skin, Marluxia finally understands. Vexen has made him desperate for release and Vexen will make him beg for it.  
"I hate you," He says with all the anger he can summon. Vexen has the audacity to laugh, fingers dancing tantalisingly across his skin.  
"You don't have the heart."  
Marluxia holds out a little longer, but the perishing cold is clouding his judgement and fogging his mind. He gives in, just moments later.  
"Fine," He spits. "You win. Now get me out of the Goddamn cold."  
Vexen lazily slides his fingers across Marluxia's cheek, immunity to the ice leaving him with no hurry.  
"You're so beautiful when you're cold,"  
"Please,"  
Marluxia has forgotten the shape of his body behind a blur of darkening, blistering pain. Vexen sways in and out of focus. Momentarily he loathes Vexen for pulling him so effortlessly into helpless weakness with nothing more than snow, but more urgently he needs to somehow survive the Academic's torture.  
"_Please_."  
Vexen's lips are less an object than a sensation on his body, the human warmth of his hands boiling his skin. Their bared stomachs bump and there's a flash of heat that Marluxia grasps desperately onto, a fractured moan rising in his grazed windpipe. Vexen pulls his lax body from the snowflakes and brushes ice from his limbs, filling his bones with a strange, displaced kind of warmth. He works with the care of a trained medic, but the touches are sensual and the wordless whispers are designed to arouse and excite. He huffs short gasps of breaths as Vexen, clinically, spreads his legs wide and explores the intimate curve of his thigh. Too slow, too slow. Marluxia needs friction, speed, heat. He arches his back into Vexen's body, aching for warmth, and the other nobody seems to relent a little, responding with the lick of a tongue that doesn't freeze over the moment he moves away. Blood racing, Marluxia can't bring himself to fight back when Vexen shoves him back down into the inexplicably less bitterly cold snow, dragging his palms across his chest and down to stroke at his length. It's the only part of his body pulsing heat and he latches to it in the hopes that the fire in his gut will somehow spread to the rest of his body. He's barely breathing, the air too sharp, conscious only for the sensations of fingers and tongues blurring into one around him and on him and in him, hard.  
He hears laughter and guesses he must have made some sort of undignified noise as Vexen relentlessly buried three fingers inside him. He ignores the unpleasant indignity and focuses instead on the rhythmic movement, the sensation of barely-liquid moisture slipping from Vexen's skin and dizzying circles stroked in his skin and burning desire heating his bones and mercy for a deeper penetration and pain, pain, pain, so perfect and the snow angels are silky soft beneath his heavy limbs and Vexen's acidic eyes are the only thing he can see through the blizzard and for a split second he thinks he'll die here in a tangle of agony and lust and Vexen's limbs, but then climax overwhelms him and warmth washes through his body and he realises that in the seconds he lost his mind Vexen has transported him through dimensions into his own feather bed.  
Wellbeing safe, he relaxes into the bedding as Vexen licks him clean.  
"Don't," He says through thick gulps to heal his windpipe, "Ever do that to me again,"  
Vexen glances up, framed by soft cascades of blonde.  
"I fail to see how it is any different from your vine play."  
"I could have _died_," Marluxia protests, pretending not to enjoy the blankets and pillows that Vexen arranges around his numb body.  
"Nonsense," Vexen quips. "I knew what I was doing."  
This Marluxia deems himself above replying. For a few minutes they share the warmth of the heated room and each other's bodies. It's Vexen, lying loosely around Marluxia's body, who speaks first.  
"So what have we learned today, Marluxia?"  
Marluxia stares at him for several seconds but Vexen doesn't relent. He thinks back to the cold and the mere minutes it took for him to succumb to its grasp, and the helplessness and the desire and the extent of the ice within him.  
"You're more devious than you look."  
Vexen sighs, but it's an amused sound.  
"Don't underestimate my power, Marluxia," He says. "You seem to have found it all too easy to forget that you of all nobodies are most susceptible to my element."  
Marluxia begins, without thinking, an indignant reply, but logic stops him. A flower is prey to nothing more than the first frost. Eventually it is all he can to to accept defeat, pull Vexen under the covers and kiss him pink without restrictions of bitter temperatures.  
"Just don't _ever_ do that again."  
Vexen laughs at him.  
"Just remember my lesson the next time you think to capture me with your beloved vines. They are no more impervious to the ice than you."


End file.
